Adventures in Baseball Archeology: the Negro Leagues, Latin American baseball, J-ball, the minors, the 19th century, and other hidden, overlooked, or unknown corners of baseball history...with occasional forays into other sports.

ed wilson

January 16, 2010

The latest issue of Black Ball reprints a short article from the April 2, 1898, issue of Sporting Life. Here it is, courtesy of the LA84 Foundation, which has digitized much of the magazine:

The Acme Colored Giants, representing Celeron (near Jamestown, New York), was the last all-black team of the 19th century to play in an organized, otherwise white league, the Iron and Oil League. They weren’t especially successful, finishing last at 8-41, but several of their players are recognizable, notably Tokohama conspiratorDave Wyatt, who would later become an important sportswriter for a number of black newspapers, and Ed Wilson. Wilson just may be the Ed Wilson who later played for the Cuban X Giants and smashed three home runsin one game off future major leaguer Stoney McGlynn in Chester, Pennsylvania, in 1902.

I didn’t know much about Wilson before, but the Sporting Life piece identifies his hometown as Bellevue, Pennsylvania, a small borough adjacent to Pittsburgh in Allegheny County. Over the years spanning the turn of the century, I was able to find one African-American man named Edward Mathew Wilson of an appropriate age living in Bellevue. There’s no smoking gun linking this Ed Wilson to baseball. He’s listed as a day laborer in the 1900 census, a “general” worker in the 1910 census (his younger brother Charles was a piano player), and as an employee of a steel car company on his World War I card. Still, the Bellevue connection seems like an important clue. The 1900 census lists his birthdate as June 1873, in Pennsylvania; the 1910 census says he was 36, and his World War I card, assuming that it belongs to the same person, has him born on January 3, 1875.

The 1900 and 1910 census entries are clearly for the same person, although so far it seems to me that the same can’t be said for certain of the World War I card. But the Sporting Life article does give us a good lead.

November 3, 2009

In the comments to my post on Cuban X Giant Ed Wilson’s three home runs off future major leaguer Stoney McGlynn in Chester, Pennsylvania, in 1902, I remarked that “at least two of Wilson’s were over-the-fence home runs, though who knows how big the Chester park was.”

Well, Bill Mullins found an 1898 Sanford fire insurance map of Chester that shows the ballpark. It’s pretty definitely the same park, as it’s on 12th Street, and the Chester Times called it “Twelfth Street Park” in 1902. While there’s no indication of where the fences were (and no guarantee that the park hadn’t been altered since 1898), this might give us some hint about its dimensions. Going by the scale at the bottom, and granting some space between the grand stand and home plate, it looks like the right field fence would have been quite close (certainly much less than 300 feet down the line) while left field was substantially farther out, and center field was potentially quite spacious (relatively speaking, anyway).

So, where did Wilson hit his home runs in 1902? Here are his four plate appearances:

In the second inning, “Wilson led off with a home run over the right wire…”

In the third inning, “Wilson repeated the trick and lined the ball over the centre field fence after two men were out and the umpire had called two strikes on him.”

In the fifth he struck out.

And in the eighth he homered again to help seal the game, but no details are given.

I don’t have any idea whether Wilson hit left or right-handed (or was a switch-hitter), and again we don’t know where the fences were exactly, especially in center field. But right field was probably quite close, and the mention of “the wire” indicates that there might have been a high fence or barrier there to compensate for the short distance.